The collapse of fertility

Spandrel has a post wondering where all the babies went, and whenever I propose one of the usual suspects, for example no fault divorce, denormalization of masculinity, and such, he says “Ah, but many Muslim countries also have fertility collapse”.

Good point. So let us look at a Muslim country with dramatic fertility collapse, and see if we can find any of the usual suspects.

So I looked at Iran

1: Harvard on the Arvan Rud.

While most of Iranian society is pretty much what one would expect of a Muslim society, for example poor employment prospects for women, legal enforcement of husband’s authority, and so on and so forth, school and University is Harvard on the Arvan Rud. Despite lower female intelligence, smaller female brains, and the fact that very few girls will wind up in employment (the rest of society still being quite Muslim) 62% of people admitted to university are female and only 38% are male. Schools and universities consider it their mission to raise female status and lower male status, to transform those horrid old fashioned obsolete unprogressive aspects of Islam. All students are compelled to attend courses urging them to have fewer children, and denigrating marriage and motherhood.

2. Who cares about 2? OK: 2 is Sodom and Gomorrah in Harvard on the Arvan Rud. Iranian girls are very strictly controlled until they get to university, coed university, whereupon … most of them are ruined for any man who would be inclined to marry her, since they will now see him as low status and insufficiently handsome and manly.

Ayatollahs! You need to behead most of these academics. These guys are planning to take your society away from you. Pretty soon you will be like wasps at the Obama Whitehouse.

The converse, however, does not necessarily apply: Is it female higher education that depresses fertility, or brainwashing that artificially lowers the status of males and artificially raises the status of females. Is it female higher education, or Sodom and Gomorrah amongst the ivy covered halls?

We would need to control with a higher education system which doesn’t brainwash its women.

I might point out at China, which does little if any purposeful lowering of male status, yet women refuse to marry all the same.

Higher education, even without active propaganda, does two things: 1. gives higher status to women, who consider themselves to be smarter and more cultivated by virtue of their degrees, 2. Has them out of the marriage market until their mid 20s. That is enough to lower the birthrate.

It’s not just education/status, it’s female freedom. Letting women make their own choices on reproduction results in most of them choosing to have a good time instead of making babies.

Take a look at communist Romania. All women in Romania received the same education as men, but birth rate waxed and waned with the structure of family law. More Freedom for women->Less babies. Less freedom for women->More babies.

Now that I think about it, if a women is free to do as she wants that basically simulates conditions where there are too many women around for the men support them, because men natural grab up as many women as they can support. Thus they move onto other areas of use for the tribe instead of making babies.

“Higher education… Has them out of the marriage market until their mid 20s.”

It’s not just higher education, though. The study “Does Female Schooling Reduce Fertility? Evidence from Nigeria” looked at number of children Nigerian women had versus how many years of public primary (elementary) school attended during the 1976-1986 period that Nigeria had “Universal Primary Education”. The result:

“Exploiting differences by region and age, the paper uses differences-in-differences and instrumental variables to estimate the role of education in fertility. The analysis suggests that increasing education by one year reduces fertility by 0.26 births.”

So even elementary school lowers female fertility. If there is a form of schooling that doesn’t lower female fertility, I’m unaware of it.

I’ve met quite a few Persians (here in Sweden) and in general they are very friendly towards European culture and civilization and are considerably more integrated/assimilated into Swedish culture than other non-european ethnicities. They are much more secular, prone to higher education and the few times a Swedish man is dating a foreign woman it is most often a Persian woman and her family will seldom have a problem with it.

Most of them even consider Iran/Persia to be an extended part of European civilization. I suppose this is due to the close ties we’ve had with them over the last century (until the revolution) and perhaps even the fact that farsi is an indo-european language and in general Persians look way more European than say Arabs or Pashtun. All of the above are personal experiences though, I might be wrong.

If we accept the above as indicators of “europeanness” then the current trajectory that you are pointing to seems quite reasonable and even deterministic in nature. It would be interesting to contrast this with a relatively western friendly arab nation in the ME, like UAE.

The problem with this outlook is that battening down the hatches, cutting intellectuals’ heads off, etc. has a rapidly diminishing rate of return. You can’t compete with a highly compelling narrative via repression unless you have a more compelling counternarrative. Otherwise, your intellectuals flee, ghostride or go underground to oppose you. But you NEED those intellectuals-you need their brains, freely given, unless you want to build a system of sharashkas.

For instance, the Lubavitcher Rebbe (and whatever you think of his religious views, the man was a beacon of how you can develop a thriving community with reactionary values in the middle of Cathedralville, against all odds) said that women who wish to pursue higher education should do so-after their first child is born. And many have. Having a compelling counternarrative allows you to take the practical knowledge which the Cathedral sits on, and let the agitprop roll off you like water off a duck’s back. When you have a counternarrative, the power structure of the Cathedral and its representatives just look funny, like a bunch of dancing idiots. Dangerous dancing idiots, but still. When you don’t have a compelling counternarrative, every day dealing with the Cathedral is an uphill battle, and most people fail.

Your point about the propaganda value of intellectuals is well founded and true. The thing I question is their actual value beyond being propaganda engines. They seem like one giant parasitical class feeding off the rest of society.

Intellectuals are OK in civil society (where they have to earn their keep). As part of the state apparatus for propagating the official belief system, they are a problem. The official belief system needs to be protected from change, not constantly mutated, thus the state has little use for intellectuals

OK, you need a bunch of intellectuals to write the book of common prayer, the King James Bible, and the book of homilies, but once those are done, the state needs inquisitors, not intellectuals.

“The intellectual forces of the workers and peasants are
growing and getting stronger in their fight to overthrow the
bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the educated classes, the
lackeys of capital, who consider themselves the brains of the
nation. In fact they are not its brains but its shit.”-V.I. Lenin

Your current intellectuals are inquisitors. How’s that working out?

You need people who will build your nukes, your computers, your skyscrapers. You need Feynmans. And these Feynmans will, in their spare time, be intellectually inclined. They will not be happy watching the Superbowl, Beyonce or paint drying. They will apply those brains to politics and social issues in the same way they apply them to the stuff you need for your society to keep functioning.

Building a blood-brain barrier is a non-starter.

Without a good counternarrative, you need a Beria to handle intellectuals. This works for a little bit. Then, before you know it, you’ve got an Akademgorodok turning into a hotbed of dissidents.

Your counternarrative needs to be compelling to intellectually curious people. That means it can either be Leftist or true.

If they are part of the political apparatus for propagating official truth, the Archbishop will tell them what to think, and the Grand Inquisitor will check them for deviation. If they don’t like it, can leave the state apparatus and join civil society, and compete in the marketplace of ideas without the state’s thumb on the scales on their side. (But with the state’s thumb on the scales on the Archbishop’s side)

…and then your next generation of bishops and inquisitors will have been exposed to the intellectuals’ ideas propagating through the marketplace of ideas during their formative years. And of course, the bishops and inquisitors will have extended families not part of the Apparatus. Here in Israel, most religious families have non-religious leftist cousins, and vice versa, and they associate regularly.

No barrier is possible. Thus, you need to find an objective truth and make that your Schelling point.

That’s a very good point, and very reminiscent of imperial China’s intellectual tradition.

China’s history is full of intellectuals who couldn’t make it to power in the imperial hierarchy, and so left for neighboring countries who would employ them, and spent their energy in sticking it to the Chinese empire who didn’t see their talents.

A large part of religious upheaval in Europe was caused by intellectual’s children who couldn’t get jobs as administrators like they parents had. They then agitated against the existing order and caused a lot of problems. This is one of the reasons that middle and lower class Europeans have been relatively anti-intellectual until recent times. For every Feynman you have a hundred Krugmans who do nothing but leach and disrupt society for their own benefit.

Perhaps infertility is not primarily a social issue in the middle east. Many arab nations practice cousin marriage (what’s called FBD marriage in HBD circles), and this may be responsible for increased infertility or miscarriage. I think SOBL (28sherman) wrote about this relatively recently.

While the topic has been put to rest, Im curious what your opinions are in regards to the fertility rates in the Philippines. Western style soap operas are extremely popular there. Hollywood films are also very prevalent due to the large penetration of the English language, and lack of regulation on bootleg films. While colleges there probably shouldnt be considered close to their western counterparts in terms of indoctrination, college education is very common among filipino women. Despite all of this, their fertility rate is 3.1 births/woman. Catholocism + poverty?

They have old style marriage and old style divorce in the Philippines.

They also have virginity in the Philippines. There are more adult virgins in filipino whorehouses seeking bids on their virginity than there are in the respectable part of most populations outside the Philippines.

Girls in the Philippines preserve their virginity as a marital bargaining chip (or in some cases a whorehouse bargaining chip) This indicates low bargaining power, possibly because a large proportion of the male population is overseas working.

So, they watch western soap operas, but evidently do not believe they could get away with that behavior.

Shortage of females, or shortage of males, can drive status more effectively than any Cathedral intervention.

You’re overlooking the role of MIT in the Shah’s Iran, and the trouble they caused the Traditional Society, leading to the rise of the Clerics. Who need education and especially Nuclear Weapons to hold off the Cathedral. MIT of course pissed off everyone with social engineering and became derisively referred to as Massachusettsitti.

For you see the Shah was our Persian Israel, and the nuclear program began under the Shah. Behold Crimson Protest against export of MIT nuke training to the Shah, 1975.

And you see even now the Cathedral and in particular Obama administration reaches for Iran as counterweight in region to Saudi and Israel. Who are in alliance against a nuclear Iran, and the very Cathedral. That is now, the links above were post WW2 to 1975.

“To return to our first map, fertility rates remain stubbornly high across tropical Africa. The analysis presented here would suggest that the best way to bring them down would be a three-pronged effort: female education, broad-based economic and social development, and mass electrification followed by the dissemination of soap-opera-heavy television.”

…In 1964, births exceeded deaths by 486,985, the highest postwar surplus. By 1972, deaths in Germany exceeded births by 64,032, and deaths have surpassed births every year since. In 2010, the difference between births and deaths stood at -180,833. Only a positive balance of net immigration has forestalled a much more rapid population decline…Fertility in the former East and West Germany followed a very similar path up to the mid-1970s. But East Germany, under Communist rule, instituted a number of pronatalist measures such as family allowances, maternity leave, and child care subsidies. Fertility rose until the economic disruption after the country’s reunification and the subsequent out-migration from East Germany to the West.

Spandrell was making the point, in the comments to his post, that married men don’t want to have many children; he didn’t think that this was due to any status-issues, but was just an aspect of the atmosphere left by the flushing out of any theological incentive to reproduce. He hasn’t reintroduced that point here, but it seems worth noting. My own impression is that the whole progressivist movement, including its feminist component, is an assault on the idea of natural law, while male hedonism is only a default mode (men without a theological incentive to be serious will be frivolous). One might ask what sense can be made of the idea of natural law when it needs theological backing; the answer, perhaps, is that we can be fully developed, complete persons only when we have the sense that we’re connecting with eternity, going with the eternal flow, but in order to accomplish this we need to feel that eternity itself is summoning us. This is what religions can provide. I doubt that fear of hell has ever been the major theologically-based factor in motivating men to live seriously; rather, the promise of a present connectedness to eternity (a connectedness that can grow without limit into some kind of heavenly afterlife that need not be distinctly imagined because its present beginnings are distinctly perceived) has been the major incentive.

In my experience men seem to want to have more children than their wives do. The default mode for Men is family formation and there’s very few civilized men who are naturally orientated towards pump and dump exclusively. We’re that way because investing in our children makes their success more likely.

I’ve banged my head against the wall repeatedly with Christians trying to get through to idea that the problem isn’t primarily the men, it’s the women. Religious groups need to start by restraining their daughters and the men will naturally flock to such groups to find good wives.

Unfortunately every religious group I’ve run across is very convinced that women are perfect beings who’s mistakes always result from the evil influence of bad men(Progressive propaganda). Of course the obvious solution of fathers keeping their daughters away from such bad men is not an allowed thought.

Neither in Europe nor East Asia. I’d say non American women are a standard deviation less bitchy than American women, and the men are a standard deviation more hedonist than American men. Most people I know had children in spite of the husbands reluctance. And in Europe many men refuse to marry even after having children.

Getting married and having children in the west is a stone around man neck. I’m surprised at how many men doing it with the current system.

Considered the fact that most societies worked quite well when men owned their children and their wives and the only downside to divorce was having to give your wife her dowry back.

As far as hedonism goes, what’s new? Marriage is suppose to be men giving their resources to the women and children, while women give their sexual exclusivity to the men. Men have always screwed around on the side and will also do so. It’s our nature. Today’s idea of punishing men for screwing around outside marriage is not a common historical idea.

If male authority over family receives social and legal support, obviously, more incentive to have children, less incentive against children.

Daughters in intact biological famiies should be subject to paternal authority (as in dad can whip them) for as long as they are fertile and unmarried, because female behavior that decreases their chance of getting married results in costs to the family, in that the family is likely to wind up carrying a large part of the burden of their bastard spawn. We need patriarchal authority to internalize the externality.

And yes children are a stone on the neck. But what are you gonna do with that neck of yours anyway? I’m quite glad Schopenhauer or Mencken spent their time writing instead of providing for a wife and kids. But it’s also a pity they didn’t reproduce. Somebody has to produce the next generation, so if everybody is thinking about the pressure of it’s own neck we are going extinct pretty soon.

“Men always wanted to screw around, but it’s quite a stretch to think all were abe to, and their wives allowed them to.”

In a normal society women can’t do shit about it. Without a the government backing them up the only power women have is sex. And when men live in a world when they can go anywhere to get laid for a small price it behooves women not to use sex as a weapon and keep their husbands well satisfied.

The idea that sleeping with a slut was committing adultery is an extreamlly recent one(Last 400 years or so). Previously to be an adulterer you’d have be sleeping with another man’s wife. STDs are a product of world wide trade, indiscriminate homosexual behavior and a lack of sensible quarantine protocols to deal with the diseases.

“Somebody has to produce the next generation, so if everybody is thinking about the pressure of it’s own neck we are going extinct pretty soon.”

Nope. What actually happens is a decent chunk of the men smart enough to do the math realize that marriage and children is a bad deal and stick to hookers and sluts. The under class with their short time preference and little wealth to loot produces the next generation. We collectively get stupider as the best and the brightest have fewer and fewer kids and the worst make up a bigger and bigger chunk of the population.

The idea that sleeping with a slut was committing adultery is an extreamlly recent one(Last 400 years or so).

I’m gonna have to ask a source for that too.

And you should take a look at Confucius writings on sex relations.

In a normal, non progressive society, bailing on marriage and relying on hookers and sluts gets you ostracized from public society, in order to change the variables in that math that smart people do. While I do agree marriage 2.0 is a bad deal, the fact that men can even choose to be bachelors forever is one of the innovations of modernity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Papia_Poppaea

“Adulterate” – meaning to improperly mix or make impure by adding improper ingredients – seminal fluid being an ingredient and the vagina being where it’s mixed. Not the other way around.

Read the wikipedia page for a brief summary. They try to dance around it because they’re 21st century politically correct eunuchs but it’s there.

In the Greco-Roman world there were stringent laws against adultery, but these applied to sexual intercourse with a married woman. In the early Roman Law the jus tori belonged to the husband. It was therefore not a crime against the wife for a husband to have sex with a slave or an unmarried woman.

The Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh or Old Testament) prohibits adultery in the seventh of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:12) (sixth Commandments in Christian enumeration and in verse Exodus 20:14). Adultery in traditional Judaism applies unequally to both parties.

For instance, the Old Testament book of Leviticus prescribes capital punishment for adultery between a man and married woman, though not for adultery between a woman and a married man.

In other words Leviticus proscribes adultery but sexual intercourse between a woman and a married man doesn’t qualify as adultery.

The wiki editors are just to blinded by ideology to even acknowledge that this could be what a word means.

Something similar goes on with the word “slut” (a slovenly woman) – as a term it specifically refers to a woman but progressives are trying to push the term to apply to men. Hell, google has unpersoned the word itself and if you type “slut” in the search bar it offers 0 autocompletes.

“In a normal, non progressive society, bailing on marriage and relying on hookers and sluts gets you ostracized from public society, in order to change the variables in that math that smart people do. While I do agree marriage 2.0 is a bad deal, the fact that men can even choose to be bachelors forever is one of the innovations of modernity. ”

It’s not new. That law you just cited was created because men were not getting married. The Romans and the Babylons tried all kinds of bachelor taxes to encourage marriage and failed. It took Christians coming on the scene with their submissive faithful virgin daughters stop the bleeding in Rome. When the quality of women is low and women have rights, very few smart men is going to marry a women who will sleep around with whoever she pleases and then sue him for child support and alimony afterwards.

As I understand it historically china had different problems where anyone with money would take all the virgin women for themselves leaving the average guy out in the rain with no options besides marrying a whore or spending him time fucking whores. I don’t know if china ever embraced women’s rights.

In my experience men seem to want to have more children than their wives do.

I don’t know about secular men (many of whom indeed seem not to want children very much), but I have lots and lots of Christian friends where the husband would like to have 5 or 6 and the wife says, “Weeeelllll… maybe three or four.”

I am married without children. I have many married couple friends without children. The anecdotal evidence for not having children is:
1) Waited too long to find a partner
2) Found a partner early, but divorced and had to find another
3) No one with any brain meets a partner and has a baby quickly after since you need to determine if the partnership will be ‘solid’ first.
4) If you are high IQ, then most likely your career is very time intensive and you have very little time for much else. When you do have a bit of free time, you want to spend it relaxing, not parenting.
5) If you are high IQ, then most likely you went to university and have some massive student loans to worry about combined with your very entry level income.
6) If you are high IQ, then you probably live in large city as that is where the information worker jobs are. This means that the cost of housing is prohibitive for you and your measly paycheck. Of course free housing for low IQ low income types.
7) Fertility is closely inversely related to the young worker unemployment rate. Europe has had very bad young worker unemployment rates for a long time.
8) There is massive information in the media about how bad the future will be; over population, resource depletion, pollution, etc.
9) Your parents were divorced and you are scared of repeating their mistakes.
10) You had to take a job a far distance from your parents, so now you have no support network to assist with the parenting.
11) That career the wife worked so hard to create gets dumped unless you are wealthy enough to hire domestic servants to care for the child.
12) The State and employers provides extremely limited assistance to for child rearing; unless you are extremely poor.
13) Media tells you that you are supposed to have enjoy life not be saddled with children. Sex and the City life is the pinnacle.
14) You see how difficult it is to raise a child in the gutter media culture.
15) You see how badly behaved your friend’s children are.
There are millions of reasons to not have a child, and most of them are very good reasons. The question should be why is the fertility rate so high given the insane civilization we are living in.

Leftist propaganda in the education system is not the reason that female education lowers fertility. Actual, existing female education just lowers fertility, period. Even in Saudi Arabia. (60% female university enrollment)

Why does it do this? Because education empowers women and raises their social status. And social status is a relative game. You can’t have a society where everyone has equally high social status, that doesn’t make sense.

If education empowers women and raises their social status, then whose social status does it lower? Men. In absolute terms, women and men both gain status from education (unless everyone is getting educated). But relatively speaking, women gain more than men.

The prospects of an uneducated, unmarried female in a traditional society are very poor. On the other hand there have traditionally been a number of ways that a man could make a living without formal education. Education raises the man’s status a little, but the unmarried woman’s status a lot (she can now support herself as a typist or something, instead of a scullion / prostitute.)

Since status is relative, this is another way of saying that female education lowers male social status. And a major trait that drives female attraction to males is… social status. Manosphere seems to be right about that one. So, female education (and female empowerment in general) makes the average man less attractive to the average female.

Now, take a look at the global map of total fertility rates. I’d link it but it might get stuck in the spam filter. Red = super fertility. Africa has a lot of red but it is hard to learn much from the African example, since Africans aren’t the same species as everyone else. There is, however, one red country outside of Africa. Not Yemen, Yemen counts as Africa.

The red country is… Afghanistan.

A couple of relevant quotes regarding Afghanistan.

———————————————————
“One’s own mother and sister are disgusting.”
“Women belong in the house or in the grave.”
“Women have no noses. They will eat shit.”
“Where there is the sound of a blow, there is respect.”

“The U.S. army medic also told members of the research unit that she and her colleagues had to explain to a local man how to get his wife pregnant.

The report said: “When it was explained to him what was necessary, he reacted with disgust and asked, ‘How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean, when one could be with a man, who is clean? Surely this must be wrong.'”

– Fox news

—————————————————

“Afghanistan’s fertility rate, one of the world’s highest before the fall of the Taliban, is plummeting in a concrete accomplishment of a decade-long U.S. campaign to improve the well-being of Afghan women.

The average number of children Afghan women can expect to have in their lifetime fell from 8 in the 1990s to 6.3 in the mid-2000s and to 5.1 at the end of the decade, a USA TODAY analysis of birth data found.

The slide is especially significant considering that the Taliban did not allow girls to go to school, endorsed child brides and ignored women’s health care.”

– USA today
———————————————————-

You getting the picture yet? Female status in Afghanistan, lowest in the non-African world. Total Fertility rate in Afghanistan, highest in the non-African world.

Clearly the social status of women in Afghanistan is artificially depressed by social constructs. Women aren’t actually disgusting at all and once your society gets to a certain level of security and technology they’re quite capable of performing all sorts of semi-useful tasks like working in the typing pool or whatever, instead of staying locked away at home all the time or working only in only the most menial positions.

But it seems that all traditional societies artificially depressed female status at least to some degree, the Afghans just take things to a bit of an extreme. Maybe traditional societies had a reason to artificially depress female social status?

Imagine if you will, a society without artificially depressed female status or artificially inflated female status (affirmative action, etc.) Does the average man really have higher social status than the average woman? It depends on the level of technology and security, but it seems that the average man and the average woman are both pretty useless and thus, low status. However, many traditionally male jobs can in fact be performed “well enough” by females and low status females can still be quite valuable to the elite, as long as they are young and attractive. Harems reaching into the thousands are not unheard of, there are a lot of lesser elites who might also like a little side action. The average woman is attractive enough to be worth something to an elite, if she’s young and at a healthy weight.

So the average man (IE: not particularly good at anything) man naturally has a lower status than the average female (useful for sex). He’s almost worthless, while she is equally useless but has one trump card.

And female attraction runs on social status, meaning that lower status men are repulsive. So how do you get the average woman to marry the average man and produce more cannon fodder? Artificially lower the woman’s status using social constructs, of course.

Both the feminists and the Taliban were onto something. Unfortunately, it turns out that some threads really shouldn’t be picked apart. Dark Enlightenment indeed.

Leftist propaganda in the education system is not the reason that female education lowers fertility. Actual, existing female education just lowers fertility, period. Even in Saudi Arabia. (60% female university enrollment)

I have not checked out the case of Saudi Arabia, but have checked out the case of Iran, where higher education turns out to be Harvard, feminism, and Sodom and Gomorrah in an otherwise traditional Muslim society.

Have you checked out the case of Saudi Arabia? Everywhere in Saudi Arabia, women are segregated from potential bad boys. Are they segregated in Saudi higher educaiton?

Officially higher education was segregated until 2009 when the first co-educational university opened. Whether or not that means actual physical segregation is unclear, but they usually try to maintain it.

I can’t guess at the content of Saudi higher education, but this is a country that didn’t graduate a woman lawyer until 2008 or let women practice law until 2013.

Saudi fertility looks to have peaked back in 1978.

What else happened in the late 70s?

———————————————————————————
During Saudi Arabia’s first oil boom many Saudi males who studied abroad brought foreign wives back to Saudi Arabia. This caused concern among Saudi fathers with daughters eligible for marriage. In the late 1970s the Saudi government greatly increased university spots for women in order to make Saudi women more desirable as wives for educated Saudi men.
——————————————————————————–

Greatly increased university spots for women, with the explicit aim of raising their status.

The data from the Phillippines had me increasingly believing it was social enforcement of virginity that made the difference, but it seems that Saudi Arabian fertility collapsed while virginity was still socially enforced.

So, increasingly looking that anything that raises female status lowers fertility, though in view of the Cathedral’s remarkable success in infiltrating the Iranian educational system we cannot exclude the possibility that the Saudi Arabian higher education system is full of militant lesbian feminists.

The KJ community enforces the Pauline rule of never allowing a woman to be in authority over men or boys, other of course than their mothers, which is less brutal than the Taliban approach, but seems to be similarly effective.

[…] say about it. Of course, it can remark on the problem, insistently, and even diagnose it with some definite precision. What it has yet to do is to cross from urgent policy recommendations to anything […]